A scientist often wants to determine substances that are within a sample. One way to determine a substance is to perform spectroscopy on the substance to obtain a sample spectrum. Then, one can analyze the sample spectrum to identify aspects of the spectrum that correspond to a particular substance. As part of this analysis, one can compare the sample spectrum to a reference spectrum of a known substance.
A problem is that there are many reference spectra, which may be somewhat similar to each other. Techniques can use a computerized analysis to quantify similarities between a sample spectrum and a reference spectrum to facilitate the comparison. However, a sample spectrum of a substance may not always exactly mirror a reference spectrum of the same substance. For example, there can be shifts in a baseline, or the two spectra may be obtained using different techniques. Thus, the differences in the two spectra are not because they are of different substances, but can be due to experimental conditions for how the spectra were obtained.
To address these issues, one typically performs some sort of correction on the sample spectrum. However, the current corrections performed often are not sufficient to identify the correct substance.
Embodiments described herein can address these and other problems.